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Conservatives have written Toronto off

Anyone who has been paying attention knows that the federal Conservatives who now run our national government have a hate-on for Toronto. Or they don't like us too much. Or they have no affinity with the T-Dot.

Anyone who has been paying attention knows that the federal Conservatives who now run our national government have a hate-on for Toronto. Or they don't like us too much. Or they have no affinity with the T-Dot.

Maybe, they've just written us off – convinced we have irreconcilable differences.

Further evidence was displayed on this paper's front page yesterday, where a 43-year-old international trade lawyer and candidate for the east downtown riding of Toronto Centre revealed he'd been ousted as Conservative candidate in the upcoming federal election, whenever it's called.

Mark Warner has been campaigning since February and was to go up against well-known NDP-turned Liberal Bob Rae. Warner's crime? He kept talking about urban issues – things that mattered to the people of Toronto Centre – like housing, poverty, health and social services.

That, apparently, runs counter to the party's national strategy, which, tellingly, prefers to pretend those issues don't exist. In fact, the federal Tories seem to figure that if they don't acknowledge that cities need serious attention and financial assistance, urban problems will go away. At the least, no one can ask them to contribute to the alleviation of a problem they don't acknowledge.

The Warner case exposes another wilful blind spot of the Harper Conservatives – race and diversity.

Warner arrived in Canada from the land of the steel pan and carnival, Trinidad and Tobago, at a young age. He's well-spoken, well-educated, and described by Rae as a "very fine, public-spirited person." He obviously understands what makes cities tick. And – glory be – he's black.

You'd think the Harper-ites would be climbing over themselves to embrace such a candidate in a party viewed with suspicion whenever the issue of cities or diversity or immigration is broached.

You'd be wrong. So deluded are the party brass that they boldly claim they couldn't be turning their backs on an ethnic candidate because they didn't even know he was black or from Trinidad. They think this ignorance is a virtue – not a sign of disconnection.

What is most disheartening about the Warner case – brought to public attention after Warner spilled the beans – is it confirms what many have believed since the last federal election, which gave Harper a minority government with no Toronto seats and only a few on the edges of the GTA.

Harper and the Conservatives have written off Toronto. They'll curry favour with Quebec, solidify the base in the west, and to hell with the city slickers and their immigrant-loving, poor-coddling, bleeding-heart liberals and environmentalists and social activists.

It's bad enough that a national party would so alienate the country's largest city, its calling-card urban region, and the source of so much of its budget surplus. It should be cause for alarm in every urban region where Toronto-type problems are surfacing.

That may be our saving grace in the end. For as much as Harper doesn't care about the city of his birth, he can't ignore voters in all urban regions. The vast majority of Canadians live in urban regions. Sooner or later, he will have to acknowledge the cries of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, which says the infrastructure deficit (gaps in funding for bridges, roads, sewers, water systems, transit, housing etc.) is approaching $100 billion across the country.

Toronto Mayor David Miller has led the call for one cent of the federal GST to be given to cities. For that campaign to work, other cities may have to step up.

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